Not, of course, the cheerful men-of-the-people Left, whose enthusiasm for soccer, rugby league, fishing, whippets, racing pigeons, etc etc knows no bounds. In this category we must also clearly include the Ed Balls of this world: he typifies whole swathes of healthy middle-class social democrats who also love their sport.
But for other, altogether unhealthy leftist categories, sport is deeply troubling in many dimensions.
1. Healthy bodies, healthy minds ... and your classic bedsit marxist is, in the immortal words of Molesworth, "uterly wet and a weed". No good at sports; resenting every second of it at skool; retreating to the library and vowing his revenge on the cruel society that mocked his performances with bat, ball and running shoe; He Hates Sport. Yes, it was social ineptness and Sport in particular that drove him to becoming a marxist in the first place: "I'll show you!". It gets nastier, too: these are the people who, physical cowards to their bones, drool at the thought of ISIS and IRA psychopaths who are actually willing to do the violence to their opponents that weed-boy can only dream about. ("You only have to look at the little faces of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell in the photos with Gerry Adams to conclude that they’d have been almost erotically impressed by the whiff of cordite" - Marina Hyde).
2. Sporting endeavour, including team sport, exemplifies individual effort and determination to win, to rise above the others, to prove that, unequivocally, there is better and worse in the performances and achievements of people, and to glory in the prospect of being best. As far from "all have won, and all must have prizes" as can be. And would Man U be willing to field a handful of 'under-represented' categories if they were no good at soccer? Would the millions of supporters stand for it? Yes - but only as team mascot, where it doesn't matter.
Incidentally, mention of team sport leads to another leftist phenomenon we'll come to a bit later.
3. Sport also handily and daily reinforces some inconvenient truths the SJWs would very much like to deny. In fact, they do deny them, actively, all the time. But being confronted with constant, self-evident refutation is never a comfortable thing.
Yup: there are inherent, significant, objective differences between - how shall we put it - different sectors of humanity, as everyone but the most tortuous doublethinker really knows. Sorry, *trans women*; sorry Semenya: but there it is (even the Graun knows this really - and the feminists are fast being forced to recognise it too). Women want to have opportunities to enjoy meaningful elite sport? (not to mention other, quite important things they might like to enjoy, like physical safety). Then the facts of nature just have to be recognised. Sport will be the undoing of the current attack-of-the-trans, in all but the most right-on universities.
(Breeding horses and dogs for sport leads to other *awkward* conclusions well-known to every working man, too - and of course George Orwell. What a minefield!)
4. Communists in power have never quite known what to do about sport. On the one hand, they know the workers love it; and it would be great for communist countries to dominate on such a globally prominent stage. But then the problems set in. Actually, they often lose: and how humiliating is that, for the superior and wholly scientific doctrine they represent? So then it has to be drugging and cheating; but that ends up in even greater humiliation: manifest inability to win, and desperation to do so, haha! What lessons does that reinforce?
As a specific instance of this, China's attitude to soccer is pretty funny. Apparently, Xi is dead keen on the game. China has a lot of able bodied people nowadays, and most of them are comendably well fed and healthy, too (I say this because it wasn't always the case). And team sports - shouldn't that be a natural for them? With their love of cooperation and coordination and discipline and etc etc etc.
Xi would really, really, love China to excel at soccer; temperamentally, nationalistically. And wouldn't it be just great politically, too! How does he privately explain to himself their utter failure to do so, and the deeper implications of this all-too-evident failure? (Hardly a shortage of resources!) It's an amusing thought and, by the way, a very good indicator that Maoism and 'Xi thought' contain glaring deficiencies in their supposedly profound, *scientific* socio-psychological assessments - even in their understanding of their own people.
So - a plague on the SJW left in their bedsits, and let's go enjoy the holiday weekend! A quick lunch - then off to the match.
ND
13 comments:
A few facts about Caster Semenya that the BBC won't tell you - they give the impression that she's just a woman with abnormally high T levels.
She has no womb or ovaries.
She has undescended testicles.
She has XY chromosomes.
The CAS press release specifically says, “The DSD covered by the Regulations are limited to athletes with ’46 XY DSD’ – i.e. conditions where the affected individual has XY chromosomes.” If she wasn’t XY, the IAAF’s regulations wouldn’t apply to her and she’d have no reason to challenge them.
https://www.letsrun.com/news/2019/05/what-no-one-is-telling-you-about-caster-semenya-she-has-xy-chromosomes/
https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/8538/46-xy-disorders-of-sexual-development
https://web.archive.org/web/20160628092447/http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/semenya-has-no-womb-or-ovaries/story-e6frexni-1225771672245
I had a tough time with sport at school. That bad that I became a county level boxer to sort out gobshite footballers. But NEVER a Lefty.
They could invent a new game called 5G.
I always thought that it was a hoot that the Socialist Countries, Comrade did well at individual events - such as those at the Olympic Games - but usually were rubbish at that great team sport Soccer/Fitba.
I suspect we can explain away the great Hungarian side of the 50s as a decadent leftover of the pre-Socialist years.
@ Comrade did well at individual events
The substances are easier to administer to individuals
I guess the only fair competition is against other women with high T or XY chromosomes or whatever. I wonder how she feels about her race wins knowing that she has a natural advantage over everyone else she competes with (who isn't doing drugs). She is really only competing against herself - if she can beat her previous best time then that is a worthy achievement.
It's also about the sport. If she was a footballer would her hormone levels matter so much?
Both sport and sex compete for popular interest with collectivist ideology, so both the Comrades and religious zealots would rather suppress both. Public schools promote sport and religion to counter sex, hippie communes promote sex to counter any tendency toward team sport or ideology.
I used to shoot in Suffolk with a man who dismissed what most folk call 'sports' as ball-games. Footie, cricket, tennis even rugby were just ball-games (or sometimes child's ball-games) in his view. He was convinced a sport involved guns, horses, foils or fists. But definately not balls. The nearest he got to te sort of 'team spirit' beloved by army instructors and minor public school masters was a sort of competitive co-operation, such as maintaining zones of fire in a rough-shooting advance across country, largely to minimise participant fatalities.
He wasn't at all surprised that the French and Italians had taken to rugby or the Indians to cricket. Let alone Latin America to soccer. Infantile races, he opined, were given to jejune passions over children's ball-games.
Of course the Comrades loathe his sort of sport even more than playing team games; independence of spirit, risk taking, physical prowess, leadership and command.
It's only shooting, FFS.
anon 6.35 - "other women with high T or XY chromosomes or whatever"
A woman with XY chromosomes is called a man. Women have XX chromosomes. Semenya is a man with an unfortunate genetic syndrome which means as I understand it that his testosterone hasn't triggered normal male sexual development, although it's had the usual effect on musculature i.e. what makes you able to run fast.
Previous anon: wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis
Speaking as someone for whom scraping into the office third team was a career high, footie is a superb mix of the collective and individual.
... which is why both china and the us arent that good at it.
I think that's part of the essence of it, Andrew
Another (related) aspect is that once on the pitch, the team pretty much has to take its own decisions, for whole 45 minute stretches. That always frightens the Chinese witless.
Many Americans are much more comfortable with coach-dictated set-piece play, too: rugby troubles them, with its desire (often thwarted,sadly) for continuity and free-flowing play, requiring 'TCUP' long after the set-piece move has run its course
any sport with a time-out is suspect
Anonymous 2.19 - wrong. There are a lot of XY syndromes, listed here - a better source than wiki.
https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/8538/46-xy-disorders-of-sexual-development
Where's your source for saying Semenya has Swyer syndrome? She has no uterus or ovaries if the Aussie DT is correct. Swyrer people have a uterus but no ovaries, and 'residual gonadal tissue'. Semenya has undescended testes.
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